English

A tumbril or cucking-stool.

A tumbril (cart), carrying prisoners to a guillotine.

Alternative forms

• tumbrel

Noun

tumbril ‎(plural tumbrils)

1. A kind of medieval torture device, later associated with a cucking-stool.
2. A cart which opens at the back to release its load.
   • 1800, The Times, 17 Mar 1800, p.3 col. B:

     They then confined the Dean, while they rifled the house of every valuable article, as well as plate and money; all that was portable they loaded on Mr. Carleton’s own tumbril, to which they harnessed his horse [...].

   • 1994, Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing:

     They’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten.

   • 1997, Don DeLillo, Underworld:

     This is a sixteenth-century work done by a Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel, and it is called The Triumph of Death (…). He studies the tumbrel filled with skulls.

3. A cart used to carry condemned prisoners to their death, especially to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
   • 1848, The Times, 26 Jun 1848, p.4 col. B:

     It is now ascertained that the tumbrel and the torches which figured in the massacre-scene of the 23d of February were prepared beforehand [...].

   • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin 2003, p. 370:

     If there would be former freemasons on the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror, they would be numbered too in the ranks of the émigré armies and counter-revolutionary Chouan rebels, and in tumbrils bound for the guillotine.

4. (Britain, obsolete) A basket or cage of osiers, willows, or the like, to hold hay and other food for sheep.

Translations